Most syntacticians, no matter their theoretical persuasion, agree that features are the most important units of analysis. Within Chomskyan generative grammar, the importance of features has grown steadily and within minimalism, it can be said that everything depends on features. They are obstacles in any interdisciplinary investigation concerning the nature of language and it is hard to imagine a syntactic description that does not explore them. For the first time, this book turns grammar upside down and proposes a new model (...) of syntax that is better suited for interdisciplinary interactions, and shows how syntax can proceed free of lexical influence. The empirical domain examined is vast, and all the fundamental units and properties of syntax are rethought. Opening up new avenues of investigation, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in syntactic theory, and linguistics more broadly. (shrink)

The Minimalist Program for linguistic theory is Noam Chomsky's boldest and most radical version of his naturalistic approach to language. Cedric Boeckz examines its foundations, explains its underlying philosophy, exemplifies its methods, and considers the significance of its empirical results. He explores the roots and antecedents of the Program and shows how its methodologies parallel those of sciences such as physics and biology. He disentangles and clarifies current debates and issues around the nature of minimalist research in linguistics and shows (...) how the aims and ambitions of the Minimalist Program lie at the centre of the enterprise to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and is manifested in the world's languages.Professor Boeckx writes for advanced and graduate students of linguistics and for all those, in fields such as cognitive science and evolutionary biology, who want to know more about current developments in theoretical linguistics. (shrink)

Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality.

This paper introduces Agreement Theorems to dynamic-epistemic logic. We show first that common belief of posteriors is sufficient for agreement in epistemic-plausibility models, under common and well-founded priors. We do not restrict ourselves to the finite case, showing that in countable structures the results hold if and only if the underlying plausibility ordering is well-founded. We then show that neither well-foundedness nor common priors are expressible in the language commonly used to describe and reason about epistemic-plausibility models. The static agreement (...) result is, however, finitely derivable in an extended modal logic. We provide the full derivation. We finally consider dynamic agreement results. We show they have a counterpart in epistemic-plausibility models, and provide a new form of agreements via public announcements. (shrink)

The role intellectual virtues play in scientific inquiry has raised significant discussions in the recent literature. A number of authors have recently explored the link between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science with the aim to show whether epistemic virtues can contribute to the resolution of the problem of theory choice. This paper analyses how intellectual virtues can be beneficial for successful resolution of theory choice. We explore the role of virtues as well as vices in scientific inquiry and their (...) beneficial effects in the context of theory choice. We argue that vices can play a role in widening the set of potential candidate theories and support our claim with historical examples and normative arguments from formal social epistemology. We argue that even though virtues appear to be neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific success, they have a positive effect because they accelerate successful convergence amongst scientists in theory choice situations. (shrink)

Les concepts de sens commun et de connaissance commune, bien qu’intuitivement proches, divergent selon leurs analyses philosophiques traditionnelles. Le sens commun est polysémique et possède une dimension sociologique, tandis que la connaissance commune est un état épistémique collectif qui a reçu des définitions formelles. Cet article montre que ces divergences ne sont qu’apparentes en révélant plusieurs points de convergence significatifs entre les deux concepts. En particulier, le sens commun inclut souvent une connaissance commune ; et la connaissance commune ne saurait (...) exister sans un certain sens commun sous-jacent. De façon secondaire, l’analyse montre par l’exemple que les différences entre les versions d’un concept en philosophie analytique formelle et en philosophie non formelle peuvent être artificielles et nuire à sa bonne compréhension. (shrink)

Some researchers have argued that firms with favorable environmental performance are more likely to provide voluntary environmental disclosure, while others have argued that firms with poor environmental performance are most likely to disclose. The authors propose a curvilinear relation between environmental performance and environmental disclosure that is moderated by visibility. Data were obtained from S&P 500 firms queried by the Ceres’ Climate Disclosure Project. Results show a U-shaped environmental performance–environmental disclosure relation and a main effect for visibility, but no moderating (...) effect for visibility on the U-shaped environmental performance–environmental disclosure rela- tion. The authors discussed the implications of these results for future research and practice. (shrink)

Non-classical views about important issues in logic and its philosophy are a distinctive trait of Shahid Rahman's work. This volume has been designed, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, as a gathering place for unconventional approaches, original ideas and attempts to question well-established standards. Some of the world top philosophers and logicians contributed to a brilliant collection of papers, some of which doubtlessly leave their mark on the work to come in logic and in philosophy of formal sciences. Contributors (...) are: Philippe Balbiani, Diderik Batens, Johan van Benthem, Giacomo Bonanno, Walter A. Carnielli, Newton C. A. Da Costa, Michel Crubellier, Francisco A. Doria, Dov M. Gabbay, Olivier Gasquet, Gerhard Heinzmann, Andreas Herzig, Jaakko Hintikka, Justine Jacot, Reinhard Kahle, Erik C. W. Krabbe, Decio Krause, Franck Lihoreau, Kuno Lorenz, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Graham Priest, Stephen Read, Manuel Rebuschi, Greg Restall, Gabriel Sandu, Gerhard Schurz, Francois Schwarzentruber, Yaroslav Shramko, Goran Sundholm, John Symons, Christian Thiel, Nicolas Troquard, Tero Tulenheimo, Jean Paul Van Bendegem, Daniel Vanderveken, Yde Venema, Heinrich Wansing, Jan Wolenski and John Woods. (shrink)

Generic oppositions create an interplay of different voices in Satires 12, particularly between the genus tenue, variously nuanced, and the big genres of epic and tragedy. The integrity of the poetic idylls of a lyric Horace is contrasted with the more compromised sanctuary of Juvenal, struggling to accommodate his luxurious friends or, less kindly, practising friendship in a world in which everything is negotiable. Beyond an ahistorical opposition of generic voices emerges a narrative of intertextual influence in which Juvenal is (...) drawn from an idyll of Augustan purity into the mercantile space of his contemporary Martial. (shrink)

There exist many competing philosophical definitions of joint action and no clear criteria to decide between them; so far the search for definitions has by and large been a semantical enterprise rather than an empirical one. This chapter describes and assesses several constraints that could help converge towards a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for joint action. The tightness constraint favours definitions that fit joint actions in which the links between agents are as relaxed as possible, so as to (...) better pinpoint the conceptual core of jointness. The developmental constraint asks for definitions based on realistic psychological states that could be entertained by agents less cognitively developed than ideal human beings. The motor constraint holds that definitions should refer to psychological mechanisms involved in actual human coordination. These first three constraints are discussed and dismissed, mainly because they manage to establish vague limits at best (for various reasons). I then introduce a fourth one, the efficiency constraint, based on the fact that most of our joint actions are generally successful, and according to which definitions should involve conditions that help justify this success. Finally, the rational and evolutionary versions of the efficiency constraint are examined and defended against objections. (shrink)

We analyse the computational complexity of comparing informational structures. Intuitively, we study the complexity of deciding queries such as the following: Is Alice’s epistemic information strictly coarser than Bob’s? Do Alice and Bob have the same knowledge about each other’s knowledge? Is it possible to manipulate Alice in a way that she will have the same beliefs as Bob? The results show that these problems lie on both sides of the border between tractability (P) and intractability (NP-hard). In particular, we (...) investigate the impact of assuming information structures to be partition-based (rather than arbitrary relational structures) on the complexity of various problems. We focus on the tractability of concrete epistemic tasks and not on epistemic logics describing them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This paper argues that, although stakeholder engagement occurs within the context of power, neither market-centered CSR nor the deliberative model of political CSR adequately addresses the specter of power asymmetries and the inevitability of conflict in stakeholder relations, particularly for powerless stakeholders. Noting that the objective of stakeholder engagement should not be benevolence toward stakeholders, but mechanisms that address power asymmetries such that stakeholders are able to protect their own interests, I present a framework of stakeholder engagement based on agonistic (...) pluralism that seeks to structure and utilize discord rather than reduce or eliminate it. I then propose arbitration as an agonistic mechanism to address power asymmetries in stakeholder engagement and explore its implications. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique: "Une synthèse paradoxale s'opère en France, au tournant du XXe siècle, entre les notions de liberté et de convention, de création et d'accord. En partant de la tension critique qui accompagne l'introduction du concept poincaréen de convention en mathématiques et en physique, Cédric Chandelier montre comment se forme un nouveau positivisme. La crise de la conscience née des transformations de la science a le caractère structurel d'un état qui se prolonge à travers la philosophie (...) bachelardienne, et jusqu'à la récente tentative de conciliation entre l'épistémologie historique et la tradition analytique. La thèse défendue est que le positivisme a survécu à sa remise en cause au nom de la liberté. En revenant aux origines du conventionnalisme, l'auteur soutient qu'il est cependant possible de mesurer la dimension cosmique de l'action réflexive de la conscience.". (shrink)

Seneca the Younger's tragedies are adaptations from the Greek. C. A. J. Littlewood emphasizes the place of these plays in the Latin literature and in the philosophical context of the reign of the emperor Nero. Stoics dismissed public reality as theatre, as illusion. The artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds are literary constructs, responds to this contemporary philosophical perception.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A theory of planned behavior framework was employed to investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility perceptions on the job choice intentions of American, Chinese, and Lebanese college students. Attitudes toward CSR, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control explained moderate levels of the variance in job choice intention in all three countries. Attitudes toward CSR, which entailed individual evaluations of CSR, were positively related to job choice intentions among Lebanese and American respondents, but not Chinese respondents. Subjective norm, the importance (...) accorded the views of significant others, was most strongly related to job choice intentions among Chinese respondents. Perceived behavioral control, the perceived degree of control over one’s actions and outcomes, had the strongest relationship to job choice intentions among American respondents. The authors concluded that respondents in the three countries did not differ in the extent to which they intend to work for socially responsible firms but tended to derive their intentions in different ways. Implications for tailoring CSR and recruitment efforts across countries are derived based on the findings. (shrink)

Οι πρώτοι λογαριασμοί του ιερού τον Απόλλωνα στο Δήλων και οι πανβοιωτικοί αγώνες των Δηλίων Μια στήλη από ασβεστόλιθο, που φέρει τρεις επιγραφές και ανακαλύφθηκε το 1992 στο Δήλεσι της ανατολικής Βοιωτίας, περιέχει τους πρώτους λογαριασμούς του ιερού του Δηλίου Απόλλωνα, που βρίσκεται στην επικράτεια της πόλεως της Τανάγρας. Η κύρια και καλύτερα διατηρημένη επιγραφή, που χαράχθηκε στην πρόσθια όψη της πέτρας, είναι ένα αντίγραφο της απόδοσης των λογαριασμών στο τέλος της θητείας ενός αγωνοθέτη, ο οποίος ήταν υπεύθυνος για τη (...) διοργάνωση των Δηλίων, του καλλιτεχνικού και αθλητικού διαγωνισμού ολόκληρης της Βοιωτίας προς τιμήν του Απόλλωνα. Η επιγραφή αυτή, η οποία χρονολογείται στις τελευταίες δεκαετίες του 2ου αι. π.Χ., μας πληροφορεί επίσης για την κυκλοφορία των νομισμάτων στη Βοιωτία εκείνη την εποχή, καθώς και για τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των πόλεων της Βοιωτίας μετά τη διάλυση της πολιτικής και στρατιωτικής συμπολιτείας το 172/1 και την επανίδρυσή της με άλλη μορφή τη δεκαετία του 140 π.Χ. (shrink)

Using various meanings of ?visit? and ?friend? this essay freely explores connections between Milton's cultivation of fame in Europe, leading to reports in the early lives of visits of scholarly foreigners to his door, and the extraordinary concentration on scenarios of human and divine visitation in the late poems. Social, political and religious strands are followed, from humanist self-presentation in the sonnets through to prophetic isolation in the late poems. Codes of friendship are rehearsed concerning confidentiality and betrayal, and attention (...) is paid to the effect of blindness on the activities of the humanist writer, the need for supporting visits, and an increasing interiority and preoccupation with the responsibilities of those engaged with God's special causes. The proto-humanist visit of Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost and the many guiding visitations in that poem are contrasted with the situation in Samson Agonistes, where divine guidance is presented as clearer in the past than the present, and the reader is invited to share difficulties of discernment in the Restoration world, prefigured in Judges. The essay ends with the simultaneous publication of Milton's humanist legacy and sale of many of his foreign-language books. (shrink)

The Intervenient Must be a Problem for the Children! This article attempts to find a theoretically and philosophically consistant foundation for the role of the facilitator of philosophy with children and draws conclusions about the type of activity that this facilitator must do. This requires a thetic implication on what makes us philosophize. We defend then that it is by the concept of problem that the philosophy appears, and that thus the facilitator must act by being an instantiation of this (...) very concept. (shrink)

It is shown that a stable division ring with positive characteristic has finite dimension over its centre. This is then extended to simple division rings.

Identifying genomic homology within and between genomes is essential when studying genome evolution. In the past years, different computational techniques have been developed to detect homology even when the actual similarity between homologous segments is low. Depending on the strategy used, these methods search for pairs of chromosomal segments between which either both gene content and order are conserved or gene content only. However, due to fact that, after their divergence, homologous segments can lose a different set of genes, these (...) methods still often fail to detect genomic homology. Recently, more advanced approaches have been developed that can combine gene order and content information of multiple genomic segments. BioEssays 26:1225–1235, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss possible differences between ecosystems and organisms on the basis of their intrinsic complexity. As the concept of complexity still remains highly debated, I propose here a practical and original way to measure the complexity of an ecosystem or an organism. For this purpose, I suggest using the concept of logical depth (LD) in a specific manner, in order to take into account the difficulty as well as the time needed to generate the studied object. (...) I illustrate this method with fully controlled Daisyworld simulations (i.e., simulations based on the Gaia hypothesis) that have often been proposed to mimic living systems. The method consists of the following sequential stages: (1) identification of the shortest program able to numerically model the studied system (also called the Kolmogorov–Solomonoff complexity); (2) running the program, once if there are no stochastic components in the system, several times if stochastic components are there; and (3) computing the time needed to generate the system with LD complexity. This measure is supposed to estimate the system complexity. It appears in this study that LD estimations fit well with the intuition we have of complex systems, with higher complexities being found for more realistic Daisyworlds. With such a method of capturing the time needed to build a system, we expect to detect in future studies any quantified differences between complex ecosystems and organisms. (shrink)

Institutional and resource dependency theories are used to develop a conceptual framework that describes how an “issue pacesetter” affects corporate issue management. The pacesetter model is developed in the following steps: changed stakeholder expectations, pacesetter emergence, heightened attention and pressure, decision making under pressure, and implementation and compliance. The model is then applied to analyze the confrontation between the mainline pharmaceutical industry and AIDS activists and stakeholders over access to AIDS medications in Africa. Analysis of this confrontation demonstrates that issue (...) pacesetters increased the effectiveness of stakeholders in placing institutional pressure on the pharmaceutical industry and contributed to the industry changing its regulations regarding access to AIDS drugs. (shrink)

Flagging labor governance in far-flung supply networks has prompted greater scrutiny of instrumental CSR and calls for models that are tethered more closely to accountability, constraint, and oversight. Political CSR is an apt response, but this paper seeks to buttress its deliberative moorings by arguing that the agonist notion of ‘domesticated conflict’ provides a necessary foundation for substantive deliberation. Because deliberation is more viable and effective when coupled with some means of coercion, a concept of CSR solely premised on reciprocal (...) corporate-stakeholder engagement is pre-mature; efforts should first be directed toward the antecedents of reciprocity and how it is to be achieved, and only then does deliberation become a reliably substantive exercise. The resulting account of agonistic CSR is generated through agonistic principles of realism, pro-action, contestation, and countervailence, and illustrated by the Bangladesh Accord. (shrink)

Marcher ensemble, porter une table à plusieurs, participer à une manifestation, et même discuter, sont autant d’exemples de coopération humaine – d’action conjointe. Par opposition, les mouvements d’une foule dans la rue, la course simultanée d’individus vers un abri lorsque l’orage se déclare ne sont que des actions collectives. Mais comment distinguer les unes des autres? Quand pouvons-nous dire que des personnes ont vraiment agi ensemble? Et comment expliquer qu’ils coopèrent même lorsque le risque d’échec est considérable? Cet ouvrage se (...) propose de répondre à ces questions, en se penchant sur toutes les dimensions de la coopération : les buts collectifs, la connaissance commune, ainsi que les facteurs psychologiques, cognitifs et stratégiques qui la favorisent. À partir de notions telles que l’identification de groupe, on défendra en particulier la thèse que certains types d’actions de masse, comme les manifestations, peuvent constituer des exemples légitimes de coopération. (shrink)

Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context changes. I argue that despite this latter (...) fragility, the effects of common knowledge on action are robust. Unfortunately, this in turn leads to a third fragility, that of the concept of common knowledge, which threatens to collapse on probabilistic common belief. This also reveals a disanalogy between the individual and the collective cases. I finally pinpoint the subtle difference entailed by the two concepts, expressed in terms of the attitude towards contrary evidence or of the agents’ awareness. As a result, common knowledge can be defended as a concept, which refers to a fragile yet distinct collective attitude. (shrink)

The paper argues that an ethical firm has cause to realize and to respect, in good faith, the decision of workers regarding labor unions, and proceeds along the following lines. First, the employer is due appropriate deference the bounds of which should be determined in conjunction with employees, as they are the most closely affected party. Second, employee preferences for defining the employment relation and appropriate deference are best reflected through autonomous voice. Third, autonomous voice is assured by the right (...) to free association and generally achieved through labor unions. Fourth, because employment is so important to a dignified existence, an economically just system of employment requires respect for workers’ choice regarding labor unions. And fifth, there are concerns and contradictions that arise from labor union operations, but they do not justify impeding a morally valid prerogative. (shrink)

Defined and formalized several decades ago, widely used in philosophy and game theory, the concept of common knowledge is still considered as problematic, although not always for the right reasons. I suggest that the epistemic status of a group of human agents in a state of common knowledge has not been thoroughly analyzed. In particular, every existing account of common knowledge, whether formal or not, is either too strong to fit cognitively limited individuals, or too weak to adequately describe their (...) state. I provide a realistic definition of common knowledge, based on a formalization of David Lewis’ seminal account and show that it is formally equivalent to probabilistic common belief. This leads to a philosophical analysis of common knowledge which answers several common criticisms and sheds light on its nature. (shrink)

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child’s skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to two different datasets (...) (_N_ = 65 and _N_ = 344) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with color metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. Gender had no effect, but age influenced all three dimensions differently. These analyses for instance differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We discussed the perspectives of such findings in comparative psychology and evolutionary anthropology. (shrink)

Most definitions of cooperation provide sufficient but not necessary conditions. This paper describes a form of minimal cooperation, corresponding to mass actions implying many agents, such as demonstrations. It characterizes its intentional, epistemic, strategic, and teleological aspects, mostly obtained from weakening classical concepts. The rationality of minimal cooperation turns out to be part of its definition, whereas it is usually considered as an optional though desirable feature. Game-theoretic concepts thus play an important role in its definition. The paper concludes by (...) answering concrete questions about what should and should not be called cooperation. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than they seem. We then argue that those three theories struggle (...) to account for three phenomena pertaining to social norms (namely context-dependence, conflicting norms and self-evidence), with which any complete game-theoretic account should in principle be able to deal. (shrink)

A recent meta-analysis by Munafò, Durrant, Lewis, and Flint [Munafò, M. R., Durrant, C., Lewis, G., & Flint, J. . Gene × environment interactions at the serotonin transporter locus. Biological Psychiatry, 65, 211–219] questioned the meaning of studies searching for endophenotypes associated with the serotonin-transporter-linked promoter region polymorphism, including our study on visual perspective during autobiographical memory retrieval. However, the association of 3rd person perspective with vulnerability for depression does not rely only on genetics. External consistency is provided by the (...) influence of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism on brain regions involved in emotion regulation and autobiographical memory retrieval . Internal consistency is provided by the increased prevalence of 3rd person perspective in both currently and previously depressed patients, as well as in depression-prone individuals. Further studies should examine therapeutic opportunities. (shrink)